The Polish event’s Grand Prix went to the Chinese feature To
Kill a Watermelon

12 European films awarded at the Warsaw Film
Festival

The 33rd edition of
the Warsaw Film Festival included 119 feature films and 76 shorts in its
programme. Apart from the awards given out across the five competitive sections,
Warsaw also presented prizes from the NETPAC jury, ecumenical jury, young
FIPRESCI jury and FIPRESCI jury.

The main distinction of the festival, the Warsaw
Grand Prix, which comes with a cash prize of approximately €22,000, was
presented to Zehao Gao’s film
To Kill a Watermelon. The Chinese drama triumphed over 14 other films shown in the
International Competition.

The jury also
gave the Best Director Award to France’s Joan Chemla for
If You Saw His Heart and the
Special Jury Award to Filipino actors Allen Dizon and
Angelie Sanoy, who starred in A
Bomb, directed by Ralston Gonzales Jover.

Competition 1-2 was won by Danish film The
Charmer by Milad Alami,
while Norway’s The Rules for Everything by
Kim Hiorthøy was named Best Film in the Free Spirit
Competition. The Documentary Competition’s jury presented its prize to
Wonderful Losers: A Different World
by Arūnas Matelis, a co-production between Lithuania, Latvia,
Italy and Belgium. The Short Grand Prix went to May
Day by Belgian duo Olivier Magis and
Fedrik De Beul. Other European films awarded at the 33rd edition of the Warsaw Film
Festival included the Polish-Dutch title Beyond Words by Urszula Antoniak
(which scooped the Ecumenical Jury Award), Hugo by Polish filmmaker Wojciech
Klimala (Young FIPRESCI Jury Award) and the Slovak-Czech co-production
Nina by Juraj
Lehotský (FIPRESCI Award).

The festival also organised an audience poll: according to Warsaw’s visitors,
the best feature-length narrative film was Sweden’s A Hustler’s Diary by Ivica Zubak,
and the best documentary was the USA’s AlphaGo by Greg Kohs.

Next year’s edition of the Warsaw Film Festival
will take place from 12-21 October 2018.